“It takes a great deal of time and thought to install work carefully. This should not always be thrown away. Most art is fragile and some should be placed and never moved again. Somewhere a portion of contemporary art has to exist as an example of what the art and its context were meant to be. Somewhere, just as the platinum iridium meter guarantees the tape measure, a strict measure must exist for the art of this time and place.” (Donald Judd, 1987)
In 1992, while driving across Texas with my friend Wilma Sanson, we made the very long and, to us, very scary trip from San Antonio to Marfa. I knew that Marfa was the town where Giant was shot and, subsequently, Come Back the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean. Marfa had the famous “Marfa lights”, which I didn’t really see, but we were there to see Donald Judd’s famed Chinati Foundation, “a contemporary art museum based upon the ideas of its founder, Donald Judd. The specific intention of Chinati is to preserve and present to the public permanent large-scale installations by a limited number of artists. The emphasis is on works in which art and the surrounding landscape are inextricably linked.”
Chinati is a going concern, a pilgrimage destination that everyone interested in contemporary art should consider taking. When we went it was barely open. We lucked out in that Judd’s nephew was around to open up the gates and show us the various barracks and fields filled with stunningly installed works by Judd, Dan Flavin, David Rabinowitch, Claes Oldenburg, Carl Andre, John Chamberlain. I might be misremembering the Oldenburg and Andre works - they may not have been there yet - but I was definitely impressed that a formidable Canadian sculptuor, Rabinowitch, was included.
Chinati was possibly the single most important in my art education. There are a few other contenders, but that trip was clarified so much for me, so much so that sometimes when I see single works by Judd or Chamberlain in a museum, they feel a bit sad to me, like monkeys in those old fashioned zoos. I’m being a bit childish, but really just honouring that moment when, all of a sudden, I had a strong intuitive experience with work that had hitherto only been known to me academically, work I wanted to like but was never as powerful for me as its counterparts in minimalist music or structural film.
